“The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death”: Dance and the Literary Imagination in Interwar Britain

"The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death":

Dance and the Literary Imagination in Interwar Britain

There comes a moment—"I will dance with you", says Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death.

—Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing Greek"¹

. . . one is at a music-hall and on to the stage come the dancers, trained to liveliness. One can say that here is the primal scene, here is exhibitionism, here is anal control, here is masochistic submission to discipline, here is a defiance of the super-ego. Sooner or later one adds: here is LIFE.

—D. W. Winnicott, "The Manic Defense"²

Recent scholarship on modernism and dance has celebrated the figure of the female dancer as not only a symbol, but as an agent of aesthetic transformation in the twentieth century. The female dancer, it is argued, embodies the quest for freedom. She represents a revolt against the confinements of domesticity, she invents, she breaks taboos, she is mad, she is criminal, society will not tolerate her, she is subversive. "She" is Lucia Joyce, Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, Maud Allan, Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, Zelda Fitzgerald.³ Her context is the heyday and decline of the music hall; the sensational impact of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet; ragtime, jazz, ballroom dance, and jazz dance; the rise of cabarets and nightclubs; dance crazes and dance "manias"; and, going farther afield, the mechanization of everyday life (embodied, say, in tap dance's mechanical rhythms or Busby Berkeley's musicals) or, the opposite, the graceful, therapeutic movements of swooping airplanes, roller coasters, zippers, and cursive writing, which, along with Duncan's startling fluidity and tragically flowing scarf, all make up what Hillel Schwartz, in a masterful essay, has called "the new kinaesthetic of the twentieth century."⁴

So compelling are the female dancers, so charismatic in capturing the imagination, that they have obscured another kind of dancing that, I shall argue, actually dominated the literary imagination in interwar Britain, and for good reason. I refer to social dancing, which was viewed as both mundane and dangerous; indeed, which brought to the fore the very potency of an everyday activity both banal and extraordinary. As experienced at parties, dance halls, night clubs, college clubs, and on the street, social dancing was both a symptom of modern alienation and its potential cure, an evanescent yet visceral form of collectivity that offered a vision of community as well as a sign of its elusiveness. Social dance (participatory and coercive, ritualistic and boring, lively and mechanical) embodied a problem of modernity—the quest for community and the desire for (re)enchantment—while at the same time putting on spectacular display the fragmentation and isolation that characterized the feeling of being modern.

The hold of social dance on the literary imagination has been overlooked in modernist scholarship; in this article, I reassert the position of dance in interwar literature and culture. Hidden in plain sight, in modernist literary scenes, biographies and memoirs, psychoanalytic commentaries, educational manifestos, and ethnographies, social dance is everywhere in the documents of interwar Britain, serving as both fact and figure of modernity—of that famous feeling that "all that is solid melts into air."⁵ What better spectacle and symbol of ephemerality than the always changing, always temporary arrangement of bodies into now this, now that configuration, always ending with their dispersal? "Unity—dispersity" is the refrain of Woolf's Between the Acts: a neat summary of social dance itself, its rhythm of individuals pulled together, then...